The Collegiate Adventure II: Grove City

Predictably, the drive across Ohio was rather monotonous after a point, although it was somewhat enlivened by the presence of service plazas, posh Ohioan versions of what in Oregon we call rest stops. Paid for by the tolls from turnpikes (another unusual thing for an Oregonian, but we still have no sales tax, ha!), these are architecturally pleasant edifices with two or three restaurants, a travel mart of sorts, restrooms, a gas station, and someone, likely funded by the state, on hand to provide help to befuddled travelers. One may find these every 25 miles, and they are most welcome to people musing about lunch or glancing with concern at their gas tank meters.


At length we arrived in Grove City, a 'town' of sorts out in the boondocks of Pennsylvania. Its population is circa 8,000, almost identical to Hillsdale's. About the town of Hillsdale I can say little, because I merely passed through it, but Grove City became a familiar locale for us, as our hotel was in the town, not on campus, and we had more time to burn. As one who lives in a fertile valley, I was tempted to cry, "where's the green?" and as a suburban creature I was tempted to moan, "where are all the people?" I told Mom I figured the trees must get their leaves around mid-July there before falling off in September after a month and a half of fleeting glory! The key attractions of Grove City are an outlet mall (which, may it be said to its credit, provided me with four perfectly suitable Dover Thrift editions of some decent literature) and the college.

But enough of venting mild wrath on the city. It wasn't really its fault for being small and having a brown countryside (especially since it is in a somewhat economically depressed region), although some of the people out in the country could have cleaned up their homes/trailers a little.

The college itself was a disappointment. Granted, I came flush from Hillsdale challenging GCC to live up to that experience, which may have had some hand in my reactions. I found the college much less satisfying than I had anticipated, however. The grounds themselves were beautiful, including a massive (and green!) quad:


The buildings were well-built and featured great architecture, particularly Crawford Hall:


and their chapel, which is one of the nicer worship buildings I've personally seen:


As for my actual experience of the place, I suppose I had better start, as so many Wodehouse characters urge, at the beginning. The following morning, we arrived at the college about 9:00 o'clock and entered Crawford Hall to see the admissions people. The lady at the desk noted that I had an interview at 10:00; we mentioned that we had been scheduled to see a chapel service, and so she told us we could go over there and see it. Perhaps we were unfair to expect someone to show us over there, as it was about a minute's walk away, but it had been scheduled as part of our visit--and I suspect Hillsdale would have sent over a guide of some sort.

In any case, we came in a little late for the chapel service, but we didn't appear to miss much: the entirety of the service that we saw was a bell choir that lasted about ten minutes. We were later told that there are usually speakers at these events, but our experience didn't much comfort me that chapel is required sixteen times per semester. (I also object to this on the ground that I don't prefer a college that legislates its students' spiritual activities. I want to go to church or chapel because I believe I should, not because my college demands it.)

After chapel, I went and waited a few minutes to have my interview, which lasted about twenty-five minutes (as compared to roughly two hours at Hillsdale). Literature that I have read about interviews warns one not to judge a college's interest by the length of an interview, and I think that's generally true, but the example times the author used were 30 and 45 minutes; a disparity of fifteen rather than 95 minutes. I was asked about my favorite books, my test scores, and some other typical things. The only question that threw me a loop was (I paraphrase), "could you describe to me some kind of service that you have performed, and what you learned from the experience?" I haven't done much in the way of physical service, like cleaning up dirty streets or volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. Both such services would be worthy things, and it may be to my discredit that I haven't had much experience there. In any case, I had to struggle to answer that question. I did mention that I want to serve through my writing, but I don't know what she thought of that.

I asked my interviewer about GCC's lack of classics department, and the fact that my 6 years of high school Latin would count for nothing there. She explained that their language courses were all of living languages and intended for practical purposes, I presume things like ministry and teaching abroad. (Latin is practical!!) She told me that she personally wanted to see a classics program at the college, and that "if the college made a decision, it could happen really fast." Yes, but what if the college made that decision the day after graduation? It wouldn't be of any consequence to me how fast it happened...

After my interview, a senior student took me, Mom, two other families and someone newly hired by the school on a walk-around tour of campus, which lasted about an hour or so. She was talkative and very ready to answer questions. It was interesting to note, however, that when talking about visitation policies between the sexes, the reason she gave for liking these was that it gave you private time to yourself, because your roommates' boyfriends/girlfriends wouldn't be hanging around all the time. I thought those policies were in place to prevent extramarital relations or the appearance of evil...

All the buildings were roughly comparable to Hillsdale's as far as function, unsurprisingly, except that there were more dorms to accommodate 1,000 more students. Some highlights include a women's dorm:




The science building:



The student union:



The Hall of Arts and Letters (humanities classrooms):



And the library:



After the tour (during which I saw many shirtless men and girls in shorts and bikini tops soaking up the sun, mildly surprising at a Christian college, though perhaps it shouldn't have been), we had approximately two and a half hours until the one class that had been scheduled for me (compared to the three that had been scheduled for me at Hillsdale). This when I spent two and a half days at GCC verses one and a half at Hillsdale. We were left to kill those two and half hours ourselves, and we spent them sitting on a bench, checking out the library (which, if a little stuffy and claustrophobic, was copiously supplied with much good literature), and attempting to mooch off the library's wi-fi. This proved impossible, as one needs a password supplied only to students, but I was able to use a desktop computer placed in the library for public use.

So the class finally rolled around: a modern European history class, in this instance on the post-World War I years and how they led up to World War II. This was the best of the three classes, and the professor went over quite a few aspects of this era, such as the lack of hero figures in World War I, how the stated aims of the governments involved changed as the course of the war itself changed, the deterioration of the German economy, and a particular Hitlerian propaganda film that he was going to show the class the next time, and what themes and ideas it stressed.

So that was a pretty good class. After that, as I recall, we went back to the hotel, visited the outlet malls, and did something or other. We did a lot of time-filling there, and the exact order of events I do not recall. At one point, I think it was the night before, we were casting about for something to do and ended up watching a forgettable and ham-fisted natural disaster film called Volcano starring Tommy Lee Jones in one of his most forgettable roles. Another different night we saw the Truman Show, though, which is always good, though it was cut for TV.

That evening we had dinner with the Marsch family (Dr. Marsch is a professor at GCC, and his eldest daughter attends there). That was the highlight of this part of the trip, with good food and conversation. I believe our families hit it off well, and had circumstances been different, and the hour not late, I would have liked to have stayed there longer. The next day we visited two classes, but only because Dr. Marsch and Abbie, his daughter, were able to get us into the classes they taught/attended, respectively--not because of a change of plans on the part of the admissions team there. I found both classes pretty elementary for college-level instruction. The first class, a core English class, dealt with a couple poems of Yeats and a short story by Joyce. The lecture was fairly spoon-fed, and the depth of instruction didn't seem noticeably greater than that in English classes I was taking two years ago.

I fancy the other class (an integrated science core class for humanities majors) would have been much more interesting if Dr. Marsch had been the one lecturing, but he shared teaching of the class with another professor, who gave a boring and lackluster talk on potential problems with evolution and Intelligent Design, and the arguments each raises to counter the other. Most of this could have been discovered in reading a couple of books over the summer. I had hoped the students would interact in Socratic-style dialogue and delve spiritedly into questions about the assumptions on both sides and the validity of their arguments, but this did not happen.

The rest of the day we had even more time to kill, some of which we spent driving around the area and exploring the somewhat cheerless countryside, where a few nice houses are dotted amongst run-down dwellings and trailers. I thought I was one who went more for solitude, but I discovered on this trip that, though I do not like big noisy parties or a rushed lifestyle, I do like having plenty of neighbors. I felt like one would be mighty lonely out here, sixty miles and more from anything of size and importance. (Mental note: Eugene has 150,000 people. Gutenberg is in Eugene. *ponders*)

Mom and I were getting a bit cynical and wry at this point, so when we passed an establishment simply called "Ultimate Renewal," my joke about a man walking in and asking if he could get all his belongings mysteriously "renewed" provoked much laughter. :-)

The following morning, we finally broke our moorings and blasted out of town, westward back across Ohio. This drive was mainly uneventful, except for one incident where our GPS, Matrix-like, conspired to undermine us. When we duly exited in accordance to its instructions, it immediately recalculated and sent us south. We were in southern Michigan and needed to head toward Detroit. Extraordinarily reassured by the reliability of artificial intelligence, we parked in some random restaurant's parking lot and reset the bally thing, after which it worked as expected, although we remained suspicious of its motives. It was rather amusing once we were reassured that some mishap was not going to leave us stranded in an unknown area of Michigan and make us miss our flight.

And then a gentlemanly 757 hauled us and a couple hundred people back here. We were most grateful to be home!